The costs of maintaining and repairing computers can be significant. One significant factor is the time required for IT (information technology) personnel to individually maintain the operability and currency of each computer. These costs can be reduced significantly by tools that permit the IT personnel to perform maintenance and repairs remotely. For example, in a situation in which a given computer must have an operating system installed, an application installed or software updated, it is inconvenient for IT personnel to physically travel to the particular computer in order to perform the installation. Tools that permit the installation of the operating system by delivering the operating system or other software across a network may eliminate the need for the IT personnel to travel, and therefore reduce costs.
Some BIOS (basic input/output systems), support a feature whereby a LAN controller may be used to access a remote boot server. Executable code is downloaded from the remote boot server, and is then run by the system. Just prior to running the downloaded executable code, the connection to the remote server is closed by the BIOS. However, closing the connection prevents the system from obtaining any further files or data from the network unless a networking stack is loaded first.